Word: anesthesia
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Most doctors believe, with their sainted masters, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,* Sir William Osier and Dr. William H. Welch, that the real originator of anesthesia was Dentist William Thomas Green Morton, a Boston contemporary of Dr. Long. From San Francisco last week Dr. Morton's daughter-in-law, Mrs. Bowditch Morton, filed her filial protest. "It's a strange thing," said she, "that Farley didn't consult with the U. S. Public Health Service.[He wants] to curry favor with the South during an election year...
Delighted with his success, Dr. Long tried ether on eight other patients. But gradually the word spread around that he was a sorcerer, and he was forced to give up anesthesia. Too modest to publish his early experiments until many years later, he laid his ether bottles aside...
...What the inhabitants need most," he concluded, "is medical care. When we were there, one received a badly smashed head, and we had to sew it up without anesthesia. Fortunately, the skull healed before the loose bones were pushed into the brain. All their teeth are rotting, because they have no dental instruments. I am sending them some as soon as possible...
...Driven by necessity, dentists were pioneers in anesthesia. In 1844, Dentist Horace Wells of Hartford, Conn, inhaled laughing gas (nitrous oxide) before a colleague pulled his tooth. But the public jeered at his "remarkable discovery...
...tissue. . . . One-handed knots and rapidly thrown knots are unreliable. Each knot is of vital importance in the success of an operation." Fresh wounds should be sealed with silver-foil, for "silver has bactericidal qualities." A surgeon must know the benefits and dangers of every type of anesthetic; local anesthesia, for example, should not be used in malignant tumor operations, or in the presence of infection, for the anesthetic needle may pick up cancerous cells and start the "seeding" of tumors, or it may injure healthy cells and make them prey for dangerous bacteria already lodging in the body...